American Christian cinema did not appear out of nowhere when The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004) was released. It was already around, for example with Billy Graham, who founded his own film production company called World Wide Pictures in 1952. Christian TV channels then appeared, whose number was notably boosted thanks to satellite and cable TV, as well as the Reagan era’s communications deregulation. However, the release of Gibson’s film gave American Christian cinema a visibility it had not really enjoyed up to that point.
The film was marketed well ahead of its release by Gibson and advertising company Motive Entertainment to different Christian communities, notably evangelicals and their spiritual leaders, who were shown clips and sometimes long extracts of the film so that they could spread a good “word-of-mouth” about the film. There were also large advance bookings by Christian communities for the film’s opening week-end on about 3,000 screens, a figure normally associated with the saturation release of a potential blockbuster. This propelled Gibson’s $30 million The Passion of the Christ ($20 million for production and $10 million for marketing) to number one at the US cinema box office (and not just in the Bible Belt), while its total domestic $370.27 million and international $239.3 million in ticket sales made it a blockbuster.
This caught the attention of Hollywood producers, who saw in this success a way to widen the potential audience of their increasingly costly productions, which also often rely on foreign audiences to turn a profit when the domestic ones prove disappointing. F1 (Joseph Kosinski, 2025) with Brad Pitt is currently such a case, as it cost about $250 million to produce and $125 million to market worldwide, but at the time of this writing, it had only earned $165,5 million in the United States, versus $344.1 million in international markets. If the themes in Hollywood films suit conservative Christian tastes, studios can try to increase their domestic profits through specific, niche marketing in what can be called Godsploitation (a reference to “Blacksploitation” in the 1970s).
If the themes in Hollywood films suit conservative Christian tastes, studios can try to increase their domestic profits through specific, niche marketing in what can be called Godsploitation.
Godsploitation
Toward this aim, and after the successful release of The Passion of the Christ, Hollywood started advertising some of its films to the Christian audience through specialized companies (like the aforementioned Motive Entertainment, Grace Hill Media and Outreach Media Group Inc.), when the theme of the productions could appeal to this specific and demanding audience. Specialized companies are indeed useful, as they know a specific audience’s needs, and create niche marketing and specific materials, with the goal being to add a new audience to the mainstream Hollywood one without antagonizing the latter with open references to the Bible.
There was such specific niche marketing targeting Christians (with for example reviews and study guides linking the Bible to some scenes from the films) created for the Walt Disney Pictures/Walden Media film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson, 2005), which features a Christ-like resurrection of Aslan, with Lucie and Susan standing as a visual metaphor for Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (Matthew, 28, 1-10). There were also such marketing and materials created for Warner Bros.’ The Blind Side (John Lee Hancock, 2009), which earned Sandra Bullock an Oscar for best actress in 2010, and Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013). Some studios have created their own specialized companies to produce and/or distribute motion pictures for Christian audiences. There is, for example, Sony Pictures’ Affirm Films, which wants to produce “quality entertainment that inspires, uplifts, challenges and captivates […] to meet the demands from audiences looking for quality, mainstream films that reflect their spiritual beliefs and values” like Soul Surfer (Sean McNamara, 2011), Big George Foreman (2023) and The Forge (the Kendrick brothers, 2025). All of them have their dedicated sites and study guides.
The Passion of the Christ thus put the conservative Christian audience, which is mainly evangelical, in the limelight. It also brought to the fore American Christian cinema, called Godlywood, whose films are not just limited to adaptations of Biblical stories. Indeed, Godlywood now offers quite a large choice of productions coming from different companies. There is, for example, The Omega Code (Robert Marcarelli, 1999), produced by Gener8Xion entertainment company, linked to televangelist Paul Crouch and his son, and which became the most profitable independent film of 1999. There are also the films written and directed by the Kendrick brothers, like Facing the Giants (Alex Kendrick, 2006). Back in 2003, the pastor brothers had created their own production company called Sherwood Pictures, before Kendrick Brothers Productions in 2013. So far they have written, co-produced and directed nine films, whose profits are redistributed to different programs funded by the Sherwood Baptist Church.
The Passion of the Christ thus put the conservative Christian audience, which is mainly evangelical, in the limelight. It also brought to the fore American Christian cinema, called Godlywood, whose films are not just limited to adaptations of Biblical stories.
Godlywood films’ main features
Though produced by different companies, Godlywood films have common features. Take the importance of prayer, as in The Trump Prophecy (Stephan Schultze, 2018), where the hero’s wife asks God to help her husband, a traumatized firefighter who extracted the body of a dead child from a burnt-down drug house. In fact, it was just after this prayer that on April 28, 2011, the hero watches a television interview with Donald Trump during which God revealed to him that he was hearing the president’s voice. The importance of the Bible and of a life led according to its precepts is predominant: in Facing the Giant, the hero turns to the Bible for guidance as to how to cope with his childless marriage and lack of success as a football coach.
Godlywood films also emphasize values like courage, self-sacrifice and patriotism through specific jobs such as police officer and firefighter. These values are featured, together with the films’ overt proselytizing intent, in the study and prayer guides that accompany the release of these productions on screens and in megachurches. These guides, sometimes available in both English and Spanish (so as to reach out to the growing number of Hispanic evangelical Christians), are often written for pastors and their congregations, linking Bible reading with some films’ clips that can be downloaded from a dedicated site, like for The War Room (Alex Kendrick, 2015).
Many of these films take place in the Midwest and the South of the United States, like in The Gospel (Rob Hardy, 2005), the Bible Belt area where the pro-life movement is of paramount importance, as seen in other Godlywood productions like October Baby (Andrew and Jon Erwin, 2011).
These films all have one common goal, which is to spread God’s and Christ’s Word throughout the world.
Finally, whether good or bad – there has been improvement in the writing, acting and directing over the years – these films all have one common goal, which is to spread God’s and Christ’s Word throughout the world, as explained on the Kendrick brothers’ site: “We are on a mission to honor Jesus Christ and make his truth and love known among the nations”.
Godlywood’s outreach
Godlywood can be classified as a genre within the American film landscape; but has it managed to achieve visibility outside the Bible Belt and the United States?
The election and reelection of Donald Trump to the White House – he was God’s choice, according to The Trump Prophecy – have made conservative Christians more visible in the public sphere, and Paula White-Cain, Trump’s spiritual advisor, is now advising the White House Faith Office,[1] after having advised the Faith and Opportunity Initiative between 2019 and 2021. These days, conservative Christians’ presence and influence are no longer limited to the Bible Belt, reaching out to and impacting many daily aspects of American lives. However, regarding American Christian cinema, its impact remains limited, notably at the international level, but not only there.
Indeed, though successful in the Bible Belt and some midwestern red states, Godlywood films have never met the success of their Hollywood counterparts. They can reach their main audience through the circuit of the megachurches, whose broadcasting equipment is more than up to the task, but outside that circuit and in mainstream cinemas, mainly on the East and West coasts, Godlywood films’ proselytizing and “preachiness” can become somewhat of a handicap to audiences who just want to be entertained. All the more so for foreign audiences, who, in some cases, might think these films are American propaganda.
And when prayer scenes are associated with sports like baseball and American football, whose rules are mostly unknown abroad, Godlywood films can be a definite “turn-off” for foreign audiences (the same goes for studio films dealing with baseball and American football, which can also be niche-marketed to Christian audiences, as was the case for 42 [Brian Hegeland, 2013], even though it featured Harrison Ford). The fact that they also depend on different international mainstream release networks to be shown abroad does not help either, as these networks do not know how to handle such films. Therefore, apart from countries like South Korea, where there is an important evangelical community – owing to Billy Graham’s work there – Godlywood films have hardly been distributed abroad in mainstream cinemas.
The growing number of subscription streaming services now offers Godlywood films another way to reach Christian audiences outside cinemas and without depending on a mainstream distribution system in theaters.
However, the growing number of subscription streaming services now offers Godlywood films another way to reach Christian audiences outside cinemas and without depending on a mainstream distribution system in theaters. In that regard, Great American Pureflix is currently leading the faith network in that field and advertises itself to American Evangelicals as offering “quality movies and programs that celebrate Faith, Family and Country”, even allowing subscribers to “filter out words like ‘hell’ and ‘damn’”. Meanwhile, New Faith Network has started providing similar types of movies and programs in Europe. Streaming services are thus the solution for Godlywood productions to bypass mainstream entertainment providers at home and abroad.
Conclusion
Godlywood has created its own niche in the American media landscape, while streaming services may well now offer it new possibilities to reach more of the faithful and potential converts domestically and internationally. Hollywood studios have also paid attention to Godlywood and have tried to court its demanding audience when some of their productions might suit its taste. However, the relationship between both worlds is still fraught with problems as they have divergent interests that have long been at odds. The studios are interested in the Christian market as a way to widen their potential audiences to make up for ever-increasing production and marketing costs, whereas Godlywood’s main goal is to spread God’s Word while entertaining people in a purely Christian way so as to increase the number of converts.
[1] Its first version, called the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, had been established by George W. Bush in 2001.
Nathalie Dupont is Professor in American studies at the University of Littoral Côte d’Opale (ULCO), France. Her research focuses on the relationship between cinema and society in the United States. She has published many articles on the Hollywood film industry, published Between Hollywood and Godlywood (Peter Lang) in 2015, and co-edited three books on cinema and tourism. She co-founded the research group CinEcoSA, which brings together academics working on the cinema and television industries in English-speaking countries.
Photo by John Chrobak made using “Ichthys symbol (fixed width)” by Kwamikagami licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. All other images used are in the public domain.
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